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Hillel Silverman, longtime rabbi whose congregant killed JFK’s assassin, is dead at 99
(JTA) — “If you want to know about my brother, Jack Ruby, you should talk to Hillel Silverman. He was our rabbi in Dallas for 10 years before President Kennedy’s assassination, and he knew Jack very well.”
It was 1976, and I had convinced Eva Rubenstein Grant — a loud woman with an even louder red wig — to appear on an ABC program to speak about her brother, who fatally shot John F. Kennedy’s alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald on live television 13 years earlier.
It was years, however, before I was able to speak to Rabbi Silverman, for a TV program I was producing about the JFK assassination. Our conversation in 1991 was the first of several chats we had about Ruby (and other topics) and the glancing role Silverman played in the national trauma surrounding the president’s murder. He was one of the last surviving witnesses who testified in 1964 before the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination.
The Kennedy assassination was a relatively minor aspect of a 70-year career in the rabbinate, during which Silverman served as the founding rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel in Dallas, and then as the senior rabbi at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles for 16 years, among other pulpits.
Silverman, the son of a prominent Conservative rabbi, died in Los Angeles this week of pneumonia at the age of 99. It was one month after he celebrated his birthday — and the birth of a great-grandson and the upcoming wedding of a grandchild — at Valley Beth Shalom in Los Angeles, where in his last official role he served as a visiting scholar.
Silverman was spiritual leader of Shearith Israel in Dallas from 1954 to 1964; Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner with links to the Mafia, was one of his congregants. Silverman told me in 2013, on the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy and Oswald murders, that Ruby would attend services to say Kaddish, the memorial prayer, for his father.
“He came to the minyan one day with a cast on his arm,” Silverman recalled. “I said, Jack, what happened? He said, ‘In my club, somebody was very raucous, and I was the bouncer.’”
Nov. 22, 1963, the day Oswald shot and killed Kennedy, was a Friday. Evening services at the synagogue “became a memorial service for the president,” Silverman said. “Jack was there. People were either irate or in tears, and Jack was neither. He came over and said, ‘Good Shabbos, rabbi. Thank you for visiting my sister Eva in the hospital last week.’ I thought that was rather peculiar.”
Two days later, Silverman switched on the radio and heard that a “Jack Rubenstein” had just killed the alleged assassin. The Warren Commission would later come to the still-disputed conclusion that Ruby acted alone — quashing rumors of a conspiracy — and shot Oswald on impulse and out of grief over Kennedy’s assassination.
“I was shocked. I visited him the next day in jail, and I said ‘Why, Jack, why?’ He said, ‘I did it for the American people.’”
I interrupted Silverman at that point, as I’d read other reports in which Ruby said he did it “to show that Jews had guts.” The rabbi sighed. “Yes, he mentioned that. But I don’t like to mention it. I think he said, ‘I did it for the Jewish people.’ But I’ve tried to wipe that statement from my mind.”
Silverman vividly described his weekly jailhouse visits to his now-notorious congregant, who was found guilty of murdering Oswald and who died in prison from lung cancer four years after the assassination. “In prison, Jack deteriorated psychologically,” Silverman recalled. “One time I walked in and he said, ‘Come on, rabbi, duck underneath the table. They’re pouring oil on the Jews and setting it on fire.’ He was quite psychotic.”
Jack Ruby, right, shoots Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, Nov. 25, 1963. (Dallas Times Herald)
Hillel Emanuel Silverman was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1924 to Althea, a prolific author, and Rabbi Morris Silverman, a prominent Conservative rabbi who edited the Shabbat and High Holiday prayer books used by the movement for more than half a century.
Hillel was ordained as a Conservative rabbi after graduating from Yale University. Following his service as a Navy chaplain during the Korean War, he led the congregations in Dallas and Los Angeles, and served 20 years as a spiritual leader of Temple Sholom in Greenwich, Connecticut.
He and his first wife Devora had three children: Gila Rutta, Dr. Sharon Pollock and Jonathan Silverman, the actor best known for films such as “Weekend at Bernie’s” and “Brighton Beach Memoirs.” He is survived by his wife of over 40 years, Roberta Silverman, his three children, three step-children (David Smotrich, Debbie Diamond and Arona Smotrich), 12 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
Silverman wrote or co-edited a dozen books, and during a visit when he was 95 told me, “I think I still have one more in me.” He was the recipient of numerous awards, including a Medal of Honor from Israel’s then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin for his “distinguished service to Israel and the Jewish people.” He was past president of the Zionist Organization of America, Southwest Region.
In his 90s, he continued to officiate at High Holiday services in southern California, at times with one of his grandchildren, Rabbi Matt Rutta.
When the COVID pandemic shut down in-person classes, Silverman conducted weekly online Torah study sessions with Rabbi Ed Feinstein of Valley Beth Shalom synagogue. Sharp-eyed participants would notice a movie poster on the wall behind Silverman for “Weekend at Bernie’s II,” in which he appeared briefly as a restaurant maitre d’.
My final visit with Rabbi Silverman took place last October. He was in a wheelchair, living with his daughter Sharon and son-in-law Mark, and his mind and sense of humor remained as sharp as ever. Last month, I was thrilled to receive a birthday email from him, recalling our discussions about Ruby and wishing me continued success in my career. “Since I am thirty years ahead of you, I can guarantee many more productive, enjoyable years!” he wrote.
During his final hospitalization, a family member at his bedside asked about the rabbi’s former congregant one last time: Did Ruby have anything to do with a conspiracy?
The family shared a video of that moment with me, in which Silverman adjusts his oxygen mask, shakes his head and firmly says, “No!”
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Musician-ethnographer Michael Alpert to receive Dreaming in Yiddish Award
Michael Alpert, an influential klezmer musician and ethnographer who has played a key role in the global renaissance of Yiddish music and culture, has been selected as this year’s recipient of the prestigious Adrienne Cooper Dreaming in Yiddish Award.
The ceremony will take place at the Dreaming in Yiddish Award Concert during the Yiddish New York festival — the largest annual Yiddish culture festival in the world — in December.
Now in its eleventh year, the hybrid festival brings together a global community for in-person events at Hebrew Union College in downtown New York, as well as online programming via Zoom. The festival includes concerts, workshops, lectures, films, Yiddish classes, dance parties and intergenerational community events.
Adrienne Cooper was a popular Yiddish singer, musician and activist who was integral to the revival of klezmer music. The Dreaming in Yiddish Award supports artists who have contributed to the contemporary Yiddish cultural scene.
Michael Alpert, also known by his Yiddish name Meyshke, received an NEA National Heritage Fellowship — the nation’s highest honor in the traditional and heritage arts — in 2015. He has been a pioneering singer, multi-instrumentalist, ethnographer and educator for over five decades. His award-winning work with ensembles including Brave Old World, Kapelye, Khevrisa and Itzhak Perlman’s In the Fiddler’s House has shaped generations of performers and listeners alike.
A native Yiddish speaker and cultural bridge between East European-born tradition bearers and contemporary artists, Alpert is celebrated both for preserving the roots of Yiddish folk and klezmer music and for composing a new body of Yiddish songs that speak to today’s world.
The Dreaming in Yiddish Award Concert — an evening of music, memories, and celebration — is sponsored by Yiddish New York and GOH Productions. It will take place on Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2025 at 7 p.m. ET at Hebrew Union College and will be livestreamed as well.
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A new documentary humanizes Israeli soldiers. It also alleges war crimes.
“It feels like a betrayal to be interviewed by foreign media,” an IDF combat veteran says. He’s out of uniform, brow furrowed, plucking nervously at his goatee. His name is Yuval Ben-Ari, and he is here — on camera, using his real name — telling us what he saw in Gaza.
Ben-Ari, who served in an infantry unit, is one of nearly a dozen soldiers who appear in Breaking Ranks: Inside Israel’s War, a new documentary from indie production company Zandland which streamed in the U.K. and can be viewed on YouTube. Four of the speakers appear on camera, identified by their real names; the rest are disguised and use aliases. Taken together, their testimonies are a scathing indictment of what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called the “world’s most moral army.”
If their stories are true — and nearly everything the soldiers say has already been corroborated by other media reports — they are describing war crimes as the rule in Gaza, not the exception. Unarmed civilians are shot or bombed as a matter of course. Homes are torched without cause. Humanitarian aid sites are shelled out of sheer resentment. The people telling us this — young men and women who served hundreds of days in the territory over the past two years — are still reckoning with their role in the destruction.
Breaking Ranks is not the first documentary to be made about the war in Gaza, and it will not be the last. But it may be the only one to focus on the targeting of innocent Palestinians while also humanizing Israeli soldiers. The soldiers outline their belief in the IDF and the importance of the mission in Gaza. The film contextualizes the war, showing footage of the atrocities of Oct. 7 and noting that Hamas leaders, too, have been charged with war crimes in international courts. Palestinian casualty figures are provided, the film notes, by the “Hamas-run Gaza health ministry”; the tunnel network, it explains, is used for smuggling and warfare. It does not avoid discussing the 251 Israeli hostages.
Those elements ultimately strengthen the film’s argument about how the war was conducted. They do not, however, soften the accounts that follow. The picture that emerges is one of lawlessness and cruelty, coupled with a tolerance for collateral damage and a lack of accountability that runs counter to the IDF’s “Purity of Arms” statute. Yet that portrait also shows the rank-and-file — not all, but some — resisting the practices of their superiors.
A tank commander (“Daniel,” an alias) recounts a time his commander informed troops he planned to destroy a humanitarian aid building. The unit warned him the building was off-limits, but the commander shelled it anyway. Then — according to the soldier — the commander made up an excuse to justify the attack: “I had an anti-tank weapon pointed at me.”
A member of a different unit tells a similar story: When a man hanging laundry on the roof of a building is deemed a “spotter,” a commander shells the structure, killing and injuring many people inside. “This kind of thing happened every week,” says the soldier telling us this story. “And that’s just my unit.”
A platoon sergeant, using the alias “Yaakov,” tells how a pair of Palestinian teenage boys came to be his unit’s human shields, sent down into Gaza’s tunnels as scouts. The unit’s objections eventually won out — they cited international law — but Yaakov insists the IDF has a policy sanctioning the practice called “Mosquito Protocol.” (The Associated Press published an investigative report on the practice earlier this year; the IDF denies that it uses human shields.)
“I carried out these things,” says Yaakov. “I hope I can find a way to live without feeling shame with every step I take.”
One soldier says his unit once reported killing 112 people over the course of a deployment. Only one of the 112, he said, was even suspected of holding a weapon.
Not all of the soldiers recalling their enlistment in Breaking Ranks regret their participation. We meet Rabbi Avraham Zarbiv, who claims to have invented the tactic of razing entire Gaza neighborhoods, block by block, with a bulldozer. Another, given the alias “Lt. Col. F.,” says he would have happily pushed every Palestinian in Gaza into the ocean, given them snorkels and “let them swim to Egypt.”
Their hawkishness puts the defiance and disillusionment of soldiers like Yaakov in stark relief. And it raises questions as to why the IDF — which says it has launched dozens of Military Police investigations into alleged misconduct by soldiers — has not found more wrongdoing.
Ben-Ari, who admits that after Oct. 7 he was “consumed by rage and a desire to fight and avenge,” has since become a peace activist; he was injured last week in the West Bank, attacked by Israeli settlers, while accompanying Palestinians during the annual olive harvest.
He vows to never return to Gaza. But Ben-Ari will not quit the IDF entirely, either. Toward the end of the film, he says he would answer a call to protect Israel’s other borders because that is what he is trained to do, and because he still believes it’s necessary.
“This separation works for me,” he says. “I totally understand if people would say I’m a hypocrite, but this is my decision.”
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AI has a reputation for amplifying hate. A new study finds it can weaken antisemitism, too.
(JTA) — Every day, it can seem, brings a fresh headline about how AI chatbots are spreading hateful ideas. But researchers tasked with understanding antisemitism and how it can be stopped say they have found evidence that AI chatbots can actually fight hate.
Researchers affiliated with the Anti-Defamation League’s Center for Antisemitism Research trained a large-language model, or LLM, on countering antisemitic conspiracy theories, then invited people who subscribed to at least one of those theories to interact with it.
The result, according to a study released on Wednesday: The users soon believed in the antisemitic theories less, while at the same time feeling more favorable about Jews as a group. And the effects were still strong a month later, even without further engagement with the LLM.
The researchers are hailing the finding as a breakthrough in the quest for identifying actionable strategies in the fight against Jew-hatred.
“What’s remarkable about these findings is that factual debunking works even for conspiracy theories with deep historical roots and strong connections to identity and prejudice,” David Rand, a Cornell University professor who was the study’s senior author, said in a statement.
“Our artificial intelligence debunker bot typically doesn’t rely on emotional appeals, empathy-building exercises, or anti-bias tactics to correct false beliefs,” Rand continued, referring to practices frequently employed by advocates seeking to fight antisemitism, including at the ADL. “It mostly provides accurate information and evidence-based counterarguments, demonstrating that facts still matter in changing minds.”
Matt Williams, who has headed the Center for Antisemitism Research since its founding three years ago, says the study builds on a growing body of research that views contemporary antisemitism as primarily a misinformation problem, rather than a civil rights problem.
“We need to think about antisemitism less like feelings about Jews, and more like feelings about Bigfoot,” he said in an interview. “And what I mean by that is, it’s not ‘Jews’ that are the problem. It is ‘the Jew’ as a function of conspiracy theory that is the problem. And the relationship between ‘Jews’ and ‘the Jew’ in that context is far more tenuous than we might want to think.”
Calling conspiracy theories “malfunctions in the ways that we make truth out of the world,” Williams said the study showed something remarkable. “People can correct those malfunctions,” he said. “They really can, which is super exciting and really impactful.”
The study emerges from the ADL’s relatively new effort to come-up with evidence-based ways to reduce antisemitism, working with dozens of researchers across a slew of institutions to design and carry out experiments aimed at turning a robust advocacy space into less of a guessing game.
The new experiment, conducted earlier this year, involved more than 1,200 people who said on a previous ADL survey that they believed at least one of six prominent antisemitic conspiracy theories, such as that Jews control the media or the “Great Replacement” theory about Jewish involvement in immigration.
The people then were randomly assigned three different scenarios: A third chatted with an LLM programmed by the researchers to debunk such theories, built within Microsoft’s Claude AI model; another third chatted with Claude about an unrelated topic; and the final third were simply told that their belief represented a “dangerous” conspiracy theory. Then they were all tested again about their beliefs.
Members of the group that chatted with what the researchers are calling DebunkBot were far more likely than members of the other groups to have their beliefs weakened, the researchers found.
DebunkBot was hardly a panacea for antisemitism: The study found that those who believed in more antisemitic conspiracy theories experienced less change. And Williams notes that the study found only that belief in antisemitic conspiracies was reduced, not rooted out entirely.
But he said any strategy that can cut against what researchers believe has been a widespread explosion of belief in conspiracy theories is a good thing.
The proportion of Americans subscribing to conspiracy theories over the last decade has reached as much as 45%, more than twice the rate that had held steady for 70 to 80 years, Williams said.
“To me, the increase in that level of saturation is far more concerning than any particular conspiracy theory moving through different generations,” he said. “I don’t think that we’re going to ever create a world in which we go under 15% — but going from 45 back to 30 or 25 seems more doable.”
The new study comes as AI models vault into widespread use among Americans, raising concerns about their implications for Jews. When Elon Musk launched a model of his own earlier this year called Grok, it immediately drew criticism for amplifying antisemitism — kicking off a pattern that has played out repeatedly. Soon, the company apologized and said it would train its model to avoid the same behavior in the future. Criticism of Grok is still widespread, but it no longer praises Hitler — though even this week it reportedly told one user that the Nazi gas chambers were not designed for mass killing, prompting an investigation by French authorities.
Chatbot training is seen as essential for delivering high-quality AI results. DebunkBot can be found online on its own website now, but Williams said efforts were underway within the ADL to convince the companies operating major AI platforms to incorporate its expertise.
“There’s far more receptivity than not, by any stretch of the imagination,” he said, while noting that the work was early and he could not share many details.
Whatever happens with that effort, Williams said, the new research demonstrates that combatting what’s sometimes called the world’s oldest hatred is possible.
“AI and LLMs — those are tools, right? And we can use tools for good and for evil,” Williams said. “But the fact that we can subject conspiracy theories to rational conversation and arguments and actually lead to favorable outcomes is itself, I think, relatively innovative, surprising and extraordinarily useful.”
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